While investigating my most recent loss in this regard (if you see
a black sock with a red “WALK!” written on the side on a rampage : email me)
I wiggled out the fact, that I never happened to loose a sock in Second Life.

I have lost many things:

– Some paintings through asset server issues.
– Some building designs by sheer stupidity.
– Lots of L$ when the bank ban broke loose a stampede.
– Minor stuff from my inventory.

But miraculously, I never lost one of my three pairs of socks.

I would either claim the reason behind this to be pure logic or
the to the limits of simulation.

Pure logic would demand that you can not loose single socks where
in SL they always come in pairs. I accept that this has its points, at least unless I interrogated people who use prim socks and testify that they lost one of those.

The more appealing reason is simulation limits:
LL did manage to create a world if not even a galaxy where nearly everything is possible. Flight, creation, love, game, communication.

But they did not manage to create the same “background-galaxies” that RL offers.
In this case, they did not manage to create the sock-galaxy, where socks could go to when they are lost.

So with no place to go… they stay.

Now if anyone opens a sim dedicated to socks only, I bet a L§ for a hundred LL-Pinetrees, it would be packed within seconds and crash due to millions of socks, which have now have found their escape-spot.

Now, since the casino-ban, the bank-ban and the policy change on open sims, I was always having a sharp eye on LL in view to any new regulations they come up with.

Those policies caught users mostly by surprise and seemed unthought, highly unjust and in all of the cases unconsulted.

Means there was not even a hint on what was coming up to the users. In comparison, LL did a leap in communications already by having the topic on the blog discussion and giving netizens the impression their voice is heard.

However, what LL missed again is to set a clear wording in terms of where a microparcel starts. 16 squaremeter or 511 squaremeter? Or in between?

In law this would strongly require a layout of terms. But due to LL is no parliament they could have been more specific in what they rule out.

As a landlord in SL all the rumors about what coming where’nt too nice to hear and ponder about. And while the actual policy is a general relief, it leaves enough uncertainty to look back over the shoulder.

But, even though undefined , I have to agree that this will be helping the mainlands attractivity in my eyes.

I know, I am about half a month late there but a happy new year to everyone.

New year, new groups, new motivation, new products could also be a headline for this.
After the last year being devilishly busy, this year started somewhat calm
during holidays I was even able to build some new things.

One of those was my new mainstore,of which I will report in some following post. I

I felt quite honoured, as the folks of Public Sandbox Group (PSG), a group of gifted builders,
who run several sandboxes like at Hyboria, Mauve, Columbine and Kings Bishop and who teach people to build,
invited me to join their ranks.

Due to this I returned to building in sandboxes instead of working alone up on my shops skyplatform.
And it seems to be true enough that company forwards creativity.

Soon after starting again to hang out there, I dug out some old project idea: the Panzerklein

This is a concept, I saw in a computer game once (and even though suspected by some, it was not
Bioshock) where people used self propelled armor-suits with heavy weaponry.

Except for the heavy weapons I liked that idea and decided to give it a try. Ad finally here is the result.
A steampunk hazard suit for the adventurous avatar, which will allow him to move to the most dangerous envivroments
without any harm.:)

Besides it will amuse its owner with some nice features like some weird sounds coming from the engine, a walk that
indicates that the constructor may have been doing something wrong here and there and my favourite:
a gramophone-sound system to amuse yourself and bystanders.

I also offer a free product demo, so everyone could try this peak point in steel-fashion before
buying it.

Having no idea if the term is still up to date, “net-weather” today again became intereresting for me again.

While in RL, I look in my homes garden and see the brightest monday since months (and a holiday with that), I see sheer blackness while looking at my SL client, which tells me that there is no login due to asset server probs. Furthermore a shy look a the blog tells me that today net weather seemed to be on blizzard with several outages.

And more and more often, I get to the point to think about blowing the whole show, revoke my premium account and simply sit and wait until any other massive envivroment comes up which allows creation and sale of own content to brighten its atmosphere.

It is not yet that I feel that LL abandoned their baby, but for considerably sure, they neglect it. There is about 60000 users max, I see to be online simultaniously (How many of them bots? Who knows.). And not one day passes, in which the grid breaks down like a old-age-wrecked railroad with a serious pneumonia.

This would be perfectly alright, if this would be an experimantel envivroment for a bunch of merry but unhappy students or beta-testers. Fact is, it is not.

The fabulous thing, LL’s vision had coming here is a grand thing, paid for by people who only want to have fun and can not because their inventory vanishes, they cannot move or simply are denied access by grid overload. Plus it is paid for by people who run a business and try to sell things they deem either nice or usefull to other people .

Now the problem with selling or even having customer relation is that you can not, if nobody can log in.

You can not have them, if nobody can teleport and follow your landmarks.

You can not have them, if nobody is able to see your shop because rezzing the surrounding on the new sim after TP takes ages for the customer so he becomes frustrated and leaves.

You can not if the customer buys anything from you and either the payment is going stale or the item is never delivered because of malfunctioning asset-servers.

I am sure, I would be able to talk about this kind of stormy net-weather all day. When you pay 125 US$ Tier per month (not to talk about an additional 19% VAT, my government never asked me for) plus the 6 US$ for a yearly premium account, you are surely not a big fish in the business, I know that very well.

But it’s the medium and small fishes that fill the net.

I find it hard to cope with the fact that coverage of the costs I have dropped from 100% with a little surplus now and then to about 20 to 50% because customers do not appear, are not able to see my shop in time or even cannot enter the whole grid. When you sell prefabs you are clearly at the end of the chain.

People have no sufficient net-weather, people buy or rent no land to place a home or business. Now if they don’t, they for sure buy no prefabs.

The sum of it is:

Even if you look at bright sunshine through your window, weather can be still stormy and clouded in another life.

Its Sunday and I spent most of my weekend on the couch being ill.But while trumpeting in Hankerchiefs I luckily found time to update the last rezboxes (long life to the laptop!). They are now up-to-date to not produce a puzzle instead of a building when used on HAVOC-servers. Also I continued to decorate the new Mainstore at Dhaulaghiri. Being sick has its advantages there *smirk*.

Now while being a mothership for viruses in general, I also scrolled the LL blog and found the post about another one of LL’s masterpieces.

The new Anti-Spam-policy.

Finally LL seems to have realized that there are adfarms in SL. For the unenlightened: An adfarm is normally a 512 squaremeter parcel of land, which is bought by some smartass, that parcels it into 16 sqm pieces and sets up ugly columns of advetising, ruining the skyline. So far so bad.

Betting on the effect that someone might be willing to pay for having this piece of goo out of his sight, the adfarmer sets the small parcels for sale on a rate which isnt nearly described by ridiculous. I have one such thing near my mainstore (see pic).

Now, -as always – LL overdraws the whole thing. In an interview, Harry Linden rencently stated, that , due to the new policy even normal ‘For Sale’ signs can and their owners can be possibly banned if repeating their offence.

What’s the point here? The thing is, there we have the new blow to economy going into start positions here.

LL obviously hasnt thought about whom they also blow with this. There are advertising-companies in SL, that keep advertising-columns inworld on 512 parcels which they offer over the normal market price so they are not bought of right away or taken over by other ad-companies. These Adcolumns are normally well designed things that no not disrupt the view of the landscape as the everyday adfarm does. Will they and their shareholders go down the drain with this?

And what ebout Real Estate companies? They regularily set land for sale and place a marker on it to announce it. Now if you deem the price for this to high, you simply report them as spammers?. Nice.

Yes, I see adfarming as a serious harassment to everyone and as a factor that takes value out of each neighbourhood, but in my opinion, LL continues its policy to cut down economy with this by simply not clearly defining, where spam begins.

So people will be freightened out of landsales or advertising their services in SL. Overruling takes the air from economy, but this seems to be a fact that LL will only see after more businesspeople take their ventures out of SL and try some other platforms.

I think I will follow the call of some real estate companies here and get the ball back. The method is easy. Simply fill an abuse report for any for-sale-marker you see, if adfarm or normal real estate and clog LL’s servers. It worked yesterday for of my 25 reports 10 where returned in a denial-of-service error.